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conquer evil

Writer’s note: I recorded this verbally last night and am now transcribing it. It just feels better for me to explain this since I’m running behind.

Good God. Here I am at 3:16 in the morning, appropriately enough, thinking about what I’m going to write today. I mean, technically I’m writing yesterday’s post, but honestly, after the day I’ve had, too bad. It’ll go up hopefully before dawn, and that’s good enough for me. Tomorrow isn’t quite here yet, so whatever.

So I was thinking about Joseph and his ability to interpret dreams. The dreams that Pharaoh has, he sees seven healthy fat cows, and then seven, ugly, gaunt, skinny cows, and they eat the fat cows, and leave no trace of them. Same thing with stalks of wheat, he sees like seven stalks of wheat and then seven shriveled stalks, or whatever, and the seven shriveled stalks devour the seven full, healthy, stalks. Then his butler, or cupbearer, depending on your translation, remembers, “Oops, hey, Pharaoh, there was a guy in prison that I was totally supposed to tell you about who can interpret dreams.”

Pharaoh goes, “Okay, well, send for him.”

Joseph comes, and he interprets Pharaoh’s dreams. He says, you know, Pharaoh tells him the dreams, and Joseph tells him, “Look, you know, God showed you twice in your dream. God showed you two times in your dream to make it real clear. Here’s what’s gonna go down: you’re going to have seven years of plenty, of riches, and you’re going to have seven years of famine. The seven years of famine are going to completely swallow up the seven years of riches and plenty so that not you nor anyone else will even be able to tell that there ever were seven years of plenty.”

So, Pharaoh realizes how wise this guy is, and he can tell that Joseph is a man of God and of great wisdom, and thus, power, and so Pharaoh basically makes him second only to Pharaoh over all of Egypt. He’s basically like, “You’re going to be my right hand man, you’re going to sit here… I need a guy like you to help me.”

Joseph makes sure that during the seven years of plenty, they store up until their stores are full to bursting. He says, “Alright, we’ve got all this stuff. We’re good to go.” When the seven years of famine come, he sells the grain and sells from the stores. People all over are suffering from this famine and Joseph sells from their stock, and despite the famine, they prosper.

So I was thinking about my own dreams, and such, and I thought it was really interesting, because it took me til today, when I was beaten down and exhausted from twelve hours of working and driving and herding children… and it wasn’t until this morning that I… Well, alright. I’ve had a similar thing happen in my dreams twice. Like the way the Pharaoh had seven rich and seven lean and so on, I had two separate dreams, months apart, where I strangled a man to death. My first thought after reading Genesis 41 was, “Am I going to strangle somebody to death? Am I going to get into a position where I have to kill a man with my bare hands?” But I realized in my dreams, the people that I strangled to death were “bad guys.”

The first one was an unidentified agent of a supernatural evil, like, there was a hint in my dream that he was actually a demonic figure. He looked like a man but he was either possessed by some evil force or he was some evil creature in disguise. The second one was a high-ranking Nazi officer, and yeah, I get it, in real life Nazis were human beings and so on, but in my dream, he was an evil man. So, I didn’t realize until just this morning that in both cases, I was snuffed out an evil life.

And see, in real life I’m sort of a pacifist. I don’t think really it’s right to take a human life. I don’t think that’s our call to make. It’s like every man, woman, and child is a world unto themselves, and each person represents something sacred and special. But anyway…

I don’t really think, unless it was an extreme case of self-defense, I don’t think I could bring myself to kill somebody, especially by like, choking them or strangling them with my bare hands.

“No, no, Jimmy, choking is something you do when you eat too fast. What I’m doing is actually referred to as ‘strangling.'” ¹

The thing I realized this morning as I was leaving my house for work is that in these dreams, I am triumphing over evil. This is the dream that God is showing me, I feel. It just came to me in a moment of inspiration. It was just all of a sudden clear as day, and I went, “Oh, that’s what it means. Duh!” It’s triumphing over evil.

I thought about it for a minute and I was like, “Ooh! Do I conquer all the evils of the world?” and I realized that’s not really realistic, but what I feel that it means that I will conquer the evil within myself. And that’s a pretty satisfying answer; I’m pretty satisfied with that. I mean, I’d like to shoot for conquering more evil, you know, in the world. You know, some bigger evil, some grand-scale evil in the world, and really help eliminate some wickedness and suffering here or there, but conquering the evil within myself would be pretty great. That’s the dream that God has shown me, and I feel pretty good about that.

So if I ever have a dream where I strangle a guy to death, let’s hope he’s a bad guy, because seriously, I need some consistency here, God. But I think two times is all I needed, and of course the second time comes just a few days ago, right before I read Genesis 41, where Pharaoh has two dreams with a parallel meaning, and it’s just interesting, it’s so funny how these things work themselves out.

This is, like, my life: funny not-coincidences. But for as weird as it is and how little I understand it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.